Ethics in Science — Substance or Rhetoric?

Abstract

Ethics is a hot commodity — with the general public, with philosophy and with the sciences. The reason for this lies less in the increased performance of ethical reflection than in a growing lack of orientation that has embraced even the sciences, or at least our dealings with scientific results. The great interest which greeted Hans Jonas with his “Attempt at an Ethics for Technological Civilizations” (the subtitle of his book Das Prinzip Verantwortung, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979) bears eloquent witness to the fact that the modern world needs ethics — and apparently has not yet found the right ethics.